The lone wolf or rural justice champion?: imagining 'the rural lawyer'
RIS ID
112905
Abstract
This paper seeks to add an account of the contemporary cultural depiction of the ‘rural lawyer’. It highlights two narratives to come from in-depth interviews with twelve final year law students: ‘The Lone Wolf ’ and the ‘Rural Justice Champion’. These metaphors are used to capture a range of stories told by students that I posit tend to frame the rural lawyer as the masculinist, solitary and on-guard ‘Wolf ’ or as a virtuous ‘Rural Justice Champion’. I suggest that student accounts may overly problematise some aspects of the ‘rural’ relative to the ‘urban’ while the Rural Justice Champion may implicitly support a deficit model of rural lawyering. Both also point to strongly gendered themes in the construction and performance of the role. I conclude by highlighting the important role that law school plays in better exposing students to rural diversity and offering opportunities for critical reflection on spatial and social inequalities through place-conscious education.
Publication Details
T. Mundy, 'The lone wolf or rural justice champion?: imagining 'the rural lawyer'' (2016) 18 Southern Cross University Law Review 31-54.